Experiment: Living Without A Home Internet Connection - <AUTHOR> http://www.graemeblake.ca/2012/04/07/experiment-living-without-a-home-internet-connection/ <comment><USER2> While interesting, I have to ask, what makes reading books, watching TV, and watching movies higher value than whatever it is you're doing on the internet?

I learn about travel, science, technology, and countless other things through the internet. While not a replacement for real life experiences, I certainly think it could be considered a high-value experience (personally I think it is better than TV), perhaps on par with reading books.

Sure, if you're spending all your time playing minecraft online... wait we have kids building graphing calculators in minecraft, nevermind.

<comment><USER3> One word: focus.

When you're on the internet, you're engaging in bite-size activities and constant task switching. Quick, how many tabs do you have open right now?

Until about 1999 or 2000, I accomplished at least four times as much per year as I do today. Before that time, there either was no Web to putter around on, or it existed but without the speed and content it has had since then.

Have you ever noticed that your best ideas come when you're in the shower, or maybe on a long drive alone? It's down to focus, and lack of distractions.

Even if you think you're reading long-form journalism or other content online, you're most likely doing it in a window of a browser, with visual clutter all around, from UI elements to menu items to the dock at the bottom of the screen. They're all subtle cues to your mind to stay alert for extra input, and not get too zoned in on whatever you're reading. Not to mention the amazing amount of visual crap most webpages surround their content with.

There's value to the vast amount of information available online, but you have to be discerning. Information for the sake of information is not always worth the mental and time tradeoffs we make for it.

<comment><USER4> I don't know, it sounds like "I don't have home internet" is more of a stand- in for "I don't have self control."

If you want to read a book, just get off the computer and read a book.

<comment><USER5> Ah, the prerogative of youth: assuming that because you don't understand something, it must be simple. And that anybody who thinks otherwise is just a fool.

Actually, willpower is a limited resource:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_control#As_a_limited_resou...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_control#As_a_limited_resource)

The people who make the best use of it shape their environments to avoid temptation:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all)

Exactly as this person did.

<comment><USER4> The solution I proposed was perhaps flippant, but not ill-thought out.

I stand by my claim that the fundamental problem that the author has is not with the Internet, it's with their willpower.

I read the same article as you many years ago when it was first published.

My conclusion, however, was different from yours. You seem to have stopped at "manipulate your environment to change how you behave." I preferred the conclusion, "manipulate your environment to change how you think." When I have distraction problems with the Internet I'll restructure my environment to provide gratification in different ways. If Internet browsing is rewarding to me to the point where it causes a distraction it now becomes an effective reward mechanism. I can make a schedule wherein a certain amount of work is rewarded with a small amount of Hacker News.

Moreover, the _entire Internet_ isn't to blame for this person's problem, only a certain set of behavior on the Internet. They describe how slower or less rich internet didn't present a distraction. Why not cap their connection speed or disable images, javascript, and sound?

I see many options and "get rid of the Internet" seems the most naive and harmful in this case.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I think your "solution" was both flippant _and_ ill-thought out.

"Just read a book" isn't a solution at all. It doesn't work, and it displays willful ignorance of how willpower works.

I'm glad to see you have now responded with some more nuanced notions, but your arrogant "duh, he's doing it wrong" tone still grates. In particular, you assume that he couldn't possibly have thought about the issues you raise. Maybe if you started with the assumption that he _has_ considered them you'd get someplace more interesting.

<comment><USER6> TFA is basically telling us that the route to success in life is to turn off one's home internet service so he or she could live as Americans did in 1985; purporting that way of life to be superior in some way because the occupations of time used several physical items instead of just a computing device.

.

If you want to read a book, you take a book, open it, and begin reading.

.

If you're still having trouble reading it, maybe you don't actually want to read it as much as you are telling yourself you do. Be honest with yourself, listen to yourself, and don't force yourself to be something you're not. If you can't find some psychological lever to help you begin learning to code, or learn French, or to stop playing WOW - something important in your life which makes you want to do this - maybe you should step back and reexamine your life and priorities.

.

Reading a book shouldn't drain one's willpower; if it is you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER5> TFA is not telling us that. He's just saying he's trying an experiment. And he's not saying that the physical items are superior. He talks about watching video and doing email and posting to blogs, so he's obviously ok with virtual things.

Also, it sounds like he really does want to do the book reading, in that's what he went and did once he was less distracted. And then tried an experiment to see how he could bring back more of that.

Also, your "it's just that simple" line is contradicted by a lot of research on willpower. (Which, hint hint, I linked.) Maybe it really works that way for you, in which case: bravo, you magnificent alien. But it doesn't work that way for most people, including the the author of the initial article.

Some books are easy books. Other books are hard, but worth the work. Some things are quick and easy gratification, but other only pay off after a while. For humans, at least, one has to set aside the former if you want to pursue the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those looking to try a less drastic version of this, I recommend LeechBlock:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock/>

It lets you list websites and then set rules around when and how much you can access them. My current way to set it up: during business hours, I have to wait 60 seconds to access a distracting website. And by wait, I mean sit there and stare at the countdown screen; if the window loses focus it cancels the countdown.

I'm amazed at the number of times a day I try to access something like HN when, after 5 seconds of thought, I really don't want to.

<comment><USER7> I've just been using my hosts file for the same effect, but this sound like a more elegant solution.

<comment><USER8> I use a combination of SelfControl.app, my hosts file and OpenDNS content filtering. I need 3 layers of protection.

<comment><USER7> Actually it's only 2 layers of protection, as SelfControl.app just appends things to the hosts file.

<comment><USER8> I'm not entirely sure how it works, but SelfControl is resilient to you manually editing the host file while it's running. I know it runs a daemon and I'm not sure if it just keeps the host file updated or if it has a secondary blocking method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had some form of Internet connection since ~2000 and up until a few years ago I never thought I could go without for more than a week or so. In 2010 I had to cut off my DSL account due to financial reasons. I was offline for around nine months and in this time I found that, code-wise, I was the most productive I'd ever been.

When hacking on random stuff while I was online, I'd often find myself starting off opening a browser to load an API reference manual or something similar, and before I knew it I was faffing about on something completely irrelevant. Sometimes it'd be related to the project I was working on (sort of a Wikipedia effect; you can't stop at just one link) and other times it would be random crap.

While I was offline, since I was stuck with the basic essentials related to a particular project (appropriate development packages, documentation etc.), I found myself not only more focused on the task at hand, but generally more interested and enthusiastic about the problem I was working on.

I am currently without a home internet connection again, but this time I have a 'smartphone' that I can tether when necessary. I've noticed having that option available can be a really bad thing for my productivity. I certainly benefit from having absolutely no possibility of accessing the internet, as long as I have all the tools and resources at hand that I need to get the current job done.

</comment><comment><USER10> Simply put: the lack of work/life balance due to not setting environmental boundaries at the onset of self employment had destroyed your productivity within both work and life.

I suggest continuing to work from an office of some sort - be it the coffee shop, a co-working space, or renting a room or desk in someone else's office, so you can continue to separate your work and life environments.

You can turn on the internet at your apartment, but place priority in what you actually want to do outside of work by granting those things greater space in that environment. If you like to read, have books easily accessible for you to pick up and read. Get a nice chair/couch for you to sit and enjoy reading. Build a nice wall of bookshelves for your books. Join book clubs, arrange lunch/dinner with people who also like to read, etc.

Make your priorities visual.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fascinating, but perhaps not for everybody. I can waste a fair amount of time online, but most often when I do it's because of a general lack of motivation due to a depressive mood. If I didn't have the internet at such times, I would just sit around and mope. At least on HN I can learn things.

<comment><USER3> I think you and I have very similar situations. My time wasted online is often for the exact same reasons.

Before the internet was such a large part of my life, that time was spent writing in my notebook or reading books (somehow watching TV just made me feel even worse). A lot of that time was also "wasted," but some of it was really valuable time that I spent getting to know myself and my own thoughts better.

One thing wasting time online has never done for me is lift my depression. The only thing that ever does that for me is getting out of my environment and wandering around outside.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Putzing around online is a symptom of an underlying problem, and I know it's time to get up, make a sandwich, take a walk, whatever. Knowing that, lately it's been a lot easier to stay motivated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I lived without home Internet for about a year in 2002 when I lived on a boat. I eventually got a wireless 56k connection. I spent time at coffee shops and wardriving for Internet. I don't recommend it.

<comment><USER13> Why don't you recommend it? What particularly did you miss and what didn't you miss?

What do you regret having now, but you put up with because it's worth the trade-off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like the same problems people have with eating: consuming a lot of useless stuff, not consuming enough of proper stuff, hurting their (intellectual) health by that. I wonder how soon people will start selling internet diets - some software that installs on your computer and controls your browsing and counts intellectual calories and vitamins for you. I'm sure there are apps like this already but not a major business like diets... So if you want to be a millionaire, make a startup doing this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I didn't expect my first submission to hit the front page. Should have done that third edit I decided to forego.

There are some good replies here. The only point I want to make is that the people accusing me of lacking self-control are 100% correct.

I disconnected my internet not because I see no value in it (far from it), but rather because unfettered access was taking too much time away from other things that I value.

Lest you get the wrong idea, I'm quite capable of avoiding the internet. I wrote ~350,000 (profitable) words last year. I got lots of other things done, too.

But, I had to use up willpower at all times to avoid the easy pleasure of surfing the web. It was unpleasant.

Most of my work is on the computer - I'm no technophobe. It's so much easier to use my computer now that it mostly does work related things unless I'm in a cafe.

I readily admit that some people may have no trouble with the internet and self-control. That's great - you have all the advantages of limitless information, and none of the disadvantages of distraction.

Many people, unfortunately, are more like me. The internet is valuable for us, but a potential pitfall. I'm hardly the first to point this out, pg had an essay on point.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html>

I'd be interested to know if he ever figured out a workable system. He posted somewhere on here that his dual computer system eventually broke down.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have been considering making the same leap.

For me it's about forcing some boredom into your life. With the Internet and TV I feel hyper stimulated all the time. To find entertainment I merely collapse into my chair, click a few buttons, and begin passively consuming.

Without something neurotically occupying my attention (ie internet) I quickly become bored. When bored I then proceed to think through everything I could possibly do, prioritize the ideas, and choose one to act upon. Even if I end up watching a television show the important thing is that I chose to watch that specific show rather than passively accepting whatever was being played at the time. I have not had TV in a long time, so that's not a problem, but whenever I've momentarily had no internet I find I eat better, exercise more, have a cleaner house, and knock more things off of my to do lists.

It's not that I want to go without internet, it's just that I do not want the internet at home. I've been without it before and really enjoyed the experience, now I just have to make the leap of canceling internet completely.

<comment><USER16> I'd say that it's less about the Internet at home and more about the 'always on' aspect.

You could try emulating the 'dial-up experience' by forcing some sort of 'connection ritual' that you must go through to get the Internet. An example setup (assuming you only have a laptop) could be to disable wifi, and force yourself to plug in an ethernet cable every time. With this setup you can still have Internet for things like an HTPC, for your television while still having the 'no Internet' on your computer experience.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely. I have a wireless button on my laptop and I generally disable wireless when I want to get work done. I like the idea of a physical ritual, I kind of want to build a big cartoony internet switch now. It's like forcefully inserting a brief moment of reflection before you use the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very interesting post. The biggest thing it's gotten me to think about is whether we've been using the internet "wrong" the past two decades. Maybe at some point in the future (or the present, for this blogger), the internet will be confined to something we only use at a certain time of the day. Or something else will supplant the internet as our leisure activity.

I've actually been running similar experiments, and you can start trying this in a much easier way than cancelling your internet. <http://ndrw.me/2012/03/01/afternoon-refresh/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting perspective. The problem is what you're spending time online doing. If you're looking at cute cats or on facebook, it's likely you're wasting time. I would also bet that lots of time is spent procrastinating. On the flip side I find time away from the computer to be highly unproductive. It's good if you need time away to relax, but overall there's alot of time wasted drinking beer, socialising etc. It's all about balance and getting important stuff done.

<comment><USER11> On-computer and off-computer time are equally (un)productive. I like to spend a long time thinking about a problem without writing any code, then get it all out in one go as a foundation to build on; something like the Feynman Algorithm. And time spent socialising is only wasted if you don't make the most of it. Like you said, it's important to enjoy yourself and maintain a good work–life balance—otherwise you'll just be unproductive _and_ depressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've had this a couple times in my life. The two nicest things about it are --

1\. A consistent bedtime and better sleep. I usually read books before bedtime, and crashed out earlier.

2\. When you do get the internet in your home again inevitably, you appreciate it more. Seriously, it's an amazingly powerful thing, the internet. But we spend so much time drowning in it that we often don't notice/appreciate it enough.

</comment><comment><USER20> Since leaving home to go to University I've completely stopped watching TV and that has increased my free time by quite a bit. Unfortunately, I would have a pretty hard time living somewhere without internet, mostly because I don't own a phone (cell phone or landline) so email and Skype are the only methods I have for communicating with the outside world.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm doing a light version of this starting in a few weeks. I've canceled my home internet, but I still have my Nexus S & access from work and cafes. It was motivated in part by the ridiculously poor level of service/price in my area, and part by the same notion that I might be happier without it.

Sadly, I can't easily travel to Cuba for this experiment (US American).

</comment><comment><USER22> > Encryption (for secure banking): Witopia.

I think your bank is doing something wrong if you need a secure VPN to do online banking.

<comment><USER23> I think he's using the VPN because he's accessing the banking site through an open wireless Internet connection at his coffee shop. I don't know enough about wireless security to say if the VPN is protecting him or not, though.

<comment><USER22> The encryption should be between your browser and the bank's servers, not between your network driver and the VPN provider. You do this with TLS/SSL (it's that little lock icon or security information panel you see when you're at an <https://> URL).

<comment><USER23> Ah, I understood that SSL encrypts the data, but I always assumed there was still a risk of it being intercepted (before encryption) if I was on an open WiFi network.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, that was my worry. But, I admit I didn't thoroughly look into whether bank-side encryption eliminates my risk from a public network.

Maybe it does, but there are enough other unencrypted sites that I'd rather have the VPN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since 2000, I've spent half my time in locations with only dialup internet access at home. While I can still get distracted by Hacker News (as I just now have when I had meant to come out and enjoy an hour of spring twilight), it does cut down on the distraction level significantly.

My laptop is entirely self-contained, with everything from mail archives to my blog in git (and large files managed by git-annex). So when the net does go out I can easily not notice for an hour or two. Or, this winter, when my solar power reserves got really low and I couldn't afford to run the internet connection after dark, it was not a big deal.

In time periods when I have broadband at home, I have considered putting a dialup throttle on it, but could never quite bring myself to do it. :)

</comment><comment><USER25> It's an interesting experiment, but I don't see how you avoid using your iPhone to waste time in the same way as you would on your laptop. (unless you cancel your data plan as well)

<comment><USER26> Have you tried browsed the Internet for extended periods of time on an iPhone? It's painful. The mobile experience still sucks for 90% of the web, bandwidth is limited and slow, and don't even imagine having all your standard tabs open. Mobile web is still very much broken.

I pointed it out earlier but like the author also don't have home Internet. It's pretty easy to avoid grabbing the iPhone and opening up safari for anything more than reading a few blog posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For what it's worth, I've not had Internet at home for about a month. I still have access at work, so not entirely the same situation, but it is nice not having the vice at home. And like the author have filled the rest of my time productively.

I recommend anyone give it a go, and if you haven't get rid of your tv too.

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree with author,you can still accomplish a lot of things with limited access.I just launched a website <http://www.mixdem.com> from internet cafe in Zimbabwe , Africa.

</comment><comment><USER28> Simple matter of self control. Something isn't right when you have to visit a communist dictatorship to have that control inflicted on you because the source of distraction is brutally oppressed there.

<comment><USER13> When you say it's a "simple" matter, and "something isn't right", why don't people "simply" fix it? What isn't right?

I claim your dismissal of it as simple isn't right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe "I don't even have Internet access" will be the new "I don't even own a TV."

<comment><USER30> More like "I don't even have a phone". Internet is bidirectional, a TV is just a _receiver_. The difference is huge.

I do live without a TV quite happily, but I could never live without at least one bidirectional medium. It would mean returning to XIX-century communication methods, which were way too time-expensive for modern life; for example, I'd have to get dressed and leave the house every time I want to communicate, find a shared communication device (public phone, post office, etc) and then have to put up with contention issues and delays (wait for my turn, get a bad line etc) on which I have no control.

OP does that -- he's relying on shared wifi at his coffee shop. Which means he's putting up with slow speed and the impossibility to download large chunks of data -- unless he's being a dick or his coffeeshop is run by Cisco, he won't be able to get that 600mb Linux distro or those 6 Gb of Oracle installers, ever. And the day someone decides to be a dick, good luck downloading your email while the pipe is saturated by Mr. Streetpirate uploading HD movies from the safety of an anonymous IP.

He might be happy with that, I don't doubt it, but his lifestyle is not for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel that you jumped to conclusions in blaming the internet for not keeping up with your reading list, to be honest. Why should anyone be judged on how they choose to waste their time?

<comment><USER17> I feel that you jumped to conclusions by believing giving up the internet doesn't have other effects on your mind and daily functions (not just a matter of using time!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Internet is became too important for us. So it' not problem of using it, it's how we us it. Most people use it for social networks, porn and other irrelevant stuf.

</comment><comment><USER33> I can see cutting cable (which I did a year ago and it's been great). But, I need the Internet.

I run an online business and many times things come up in the middle of the night. I also communicate with most of my friends and family though email or Facebook.

You just need to have some self-control. It's not easy, but it can be done.

</comment><comment><USER34> Great idea and can relate after two months without proper internet availability. I spend so much time just surfing and having a smart phone doesn't help. I don't have the self discipline just to stop. Maybe ISP s can offer a service tolock your connection at certain times off the day?</comment>


A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf

<comment><USER2> This looks great and I'm looking forward to reading it properly. But it gave me a jolt to read the following:

 _Weil wrote this fourteen-page letter to Simone Weil, his sister [...] Keep in mind that the letter was not written for a mathematician, even though Simone could not understand most of it._

Could not understand it? Why'd he write it to her then? (Edit: he commented on this; see below.)

Simone Weil was brilliant. She had remarkable mathematical gifts, though she decided early on that she wasn't good at math by comparing herself to her brother. (André was not only a mathematical genius, he was 3 years older. Talk about an unfortunate data point.) She ended up, in her brief life, doing remarkable philosophical, political, and spiritual work. Her intellect was as deep and as original as they come. At the time this letter was written, she would have been at the height of her powers (working for the French resistance in London, as I recall, writing a book about how to rebuild France after the war - a book which de Gaulle supposedly threw in the garbage without reading).

Simone and André Weil used to act scenes from Greek tragedy _in Greek_ when she was 4 and he was 7. As George Grant once said, that family had intellectual culture in a way we in modern North America can't even imagine.

To make patronizing comments about what Simone Weil couldn't understand is pretty ignorant. Based on what we know about her, though, she wouldn't have minded.

(Sorry this comment has nothing to do with the actual content of the post.)

<comment><USER3> The letter itself says: "So, I decided to write them down, even if for the most part they are incomprehensible to you" and "you may be able to understand the beginning; you will understand nothing of what follows that."

That shows that Andre thought Simone wouldn't understand it.

<comment><USER2> Oh, that's interesting. I probably shouldn't have commented without reading the whole thing, especially since what I said was a bit off-topic. (It's often easier to comment on tangential things, which makes a lot of discussions go awry.) I recommend upvoting mgreenbe, who actually has something on-topic to say!

Come to think of it, I vaguely remember reading this, or excerpts from it, years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This notion of "analogy" is formalized in category theory. At times this is done to great effect --- the generalizing power of category theory can help a mathematician see the forest for the trees. This has been done to great effect, e.g., in programming language theory. Then again, at times category theory is shallow, nothing more than abstract nonsense. (N.B. this is a technical term.)

The strict formalist in me likes category theory because it has so many names for things, many of which are in Greek. The intuitionist in me thinks the field is pointless but likes drawings with arrows in them. All in all, it's a win-win. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Its very succint but for those interested in number theory its a great precis</comment>


Bacteria and Colon Cancer - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/22/bacteria-and-colon-cancer <comment><USER2> What causes one bacteria to flourish in the colon? Is it a lack of other flora? Is it diet related?

Not to be crass, but I also kind of wonder what it smells like. Are there scientists who study the smells of these biological systems? Seems like that would be a high bandwidth way to gain insight into a gut.

<comment><USER3> Diet and what other organisms are in your gut. So things like probiotics, antibiotics, etc can change it. C. diff has a funky unique smell and is an opportunistic organism that takes over sometimes and the best treatment when antibiotics fail is a fecal transplant!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice forward progress on the search for a preventative treatment. Also TIL bad gum health can lead to colon cancer. So counter intuitive. _runs off to brush teeth_

<comment><USER5> Brushing and flossing does also damage your gums depending on the force and utility. Thats worst then doing nothing because now bacteria can enter your blood stream and hitch a ride to the other parts of the body.

Much better option is to not eat carbs which universally damage teath.

<comment><USER6> Yeah sure, carbs are the ultimate devil in todays hipster keto obsessed world. There is just a slight problem that in short they were never a problem during our history when you eat unprocessed whole foods.

<comment><USER5> You are not thinking this right. The carb landscape changed quite a bit compared to the time our teeth evolved:

\- we eat simple carbs a lot now

\- we selected fruit for generations based on sugar content

\- we eat carbs constantly, year after year

\- we ingest less of protective substances like Vitamin C

i.e. you can't just prefix a thing with 'hipster' and call it a day.

<comment><USER7> \- we eat much less dietary fiber (generally)

<comment><USER5> While that is true, its uncertain how dietary fiber would influence this. Since bacteria can only digest it, it might be feeding the pathogen. It also reduces the acid barrier so it makes stomach survivable.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to know. Please share whatever you've learned.

FWIW I've lowered my LDL thru diet; less dairy and a lot more grains and beans. And Dr Lustig says fiber blocks metabolism of fructose.

<comment><USER5> > I'd like to know. Please share whatever you've learned.

Wouldn't we all :) If I share what I learned, we will be here a very long time...

> FWIW I've lowered my LDL thru diet

Its entirely different context that has no relevance to the topic. Eating fiber anywayz is akin to eating fat AFAIK as colon bacteria digest it into short SFA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A useful keyword in this is Helicobacter pylori.

Apparently a huge percentage of people have it, especially in developing countries but not limited to them, and it is known to cause a lot of problems though there is debate about possible benefits of it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori)

There is a sort of cure for it involving proton pump inhibitors and antibiotics. After which, your stomach feels a ton better and your probability of stomach cancer likely decreased.

I had chronic stomach aches since I returned from a long traveling in Thailand. Only recently did I apply this treatment. I've never had such great stomach health.

This was self-diagnosed and treated. I know what many on hacker news thinks about non-experts talking about these sorts of things in recent months. I think that's absurd.

Help yourself because no one else is more invested in your health.

<comment><USER9> Could you provide some info/links for this cure?

<comment><USER8> There's actually a wiki article that lists the standard protocol that a lot of research papers also say.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori_eradicatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori_eradication_protocols)

I went through the research papers on the subject and didn't find any indication that one treatment listed in the table did a whole lot better than another combination. Eradication rates seem to be between 70-95 percent depending on the claim of the paper which seems to be in range of likely errors with each paper.

The proton pump inhibitors are over the counter in the US but antibiotics are not (though they are in many other countries). It's a shame that the US is so restrictive here.</comment></comment></comment>


Eclipse Helios - <AUTHOR> http://www.eclipse.org/helios/

<comment><USER2> I'm giving it a try now. Android and SVN plug-ins (the only ones I need at the moment) both installed just fine. It seems to start up a bit more quickly, but I don't have all of the plug-ins I had on the old install, so it's not really a fair comparison.

This doesn't seem to be a major release, so I'm not expecting miracles. Hopefully it will have better performance and less memory usage, though.

\---

Update: It seems my dreams were short lived. Auto-complete seems to be absolutely horrible now. I'm getting a 30+s delay on pressing ctrl+space after typing the period on an EditText variable. Yuck.

<comment><USER3> If you are on MacOS, the package contents contain the memory settings in eclipse.ini. I'd recommend bumping them up, particularly the maximum memory.

Here's what I am using:

-Xms512m -Xmx700m</comment></comment>


Amazon Honeycode: Yet Another No-Code Contender - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2020/06/26/amazon-honeycode-yet-another-no-code-contender/ <comment><USER2> This article is good reminder that "no code" doesn't mean "no programming." If a person can figure out the logic to wire something like this together, they _are_ programming. The tough part about coding isn't syntax or typing, its architecture, logic, and dataflow and these "no code" platforms still expect people to figure all that out.</comment>


Termite: A generic distributed compilation system in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hanwen/termite <comment><USER2> The big problem with distributed compilation is not the distribution of jobs (there are tons of ways to do that), but resolving the dependency information correctly. I founded Electric Cloud (<http://www.electric-cloud.com/>) to solve this problem and we ended up needing to:

1\. Completely understand the build process from the build script (e.g. Makefile)

2\. Write a parallel distributed, versioned file system so that we could automatically spot the dependencies that were not mentioned in the build script.

Once we'd done that we were able to get very high parallelism from unmodified build scripts which was impossible with tools like make -j, distcc, etc. The reason is that almost all build scripts assume serial builds and thus do things like reusing a temporary file name which breaks parallelism. Or you have nightmares like a shared precompiled header file that everyone is updating.

Once you crank up the parallelism then you can start worrying about disk latency, network latency etc. That led us to do everything in RAM on the worker nodes, our own binary protocol with compression, and peer-to-peer communication inside the worker node cluster to maximize switch utilization and minimize master load.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I scanned the frontpage and saw "termite" and "distributed" in the title I thought it would be about Termite the distributed Scheme. See <http://code.google.com/p/termite/>

It's been around for quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool. Great work, Hanwen!

I'm interested by the fact that he has sufficient Go code to compile to make distribution useful. After all, a Go screencast shows the entire standard library getting compiled in seconds on a macbook.

<comment><USER5> Hi Rob! Long time no see; how are you?

Termite is not intended for compiling Go, but rather for large projects that use C++, Java, etc, and especially for projects that cannot use DistCC. In particular, a large project that uses DEX comes to mind, but I imagine there are others.

It's also a spin-off of my FUSE library in Go: I was looking for something that really needs FUSE to be effective, and a language that supports concurrency and networking so easily as Go is awesome for building a distributed system.

I'm surprised at the attention it got (25 followers on github); I had intended to write an official announcement only after I reached a serious milestone (eg. compiling the linux kernel in a few seconds.)

As for the name, I was thinking of a social insect in Brazil; maybe I should change the name to Cupim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds very similar to _distcc_ (that has been around for ages).

<http://www.distcc.org>

<comment><USER7> It's similar, but uses some tricks so that you don't have to heavily modify the build tools to use it.

<comment><USER8> What about icecream which also has been around for ages?

<http://en.opensuse.org/Icecream></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't post authors see the reason a post was flagged? - <AUTHOR> I posted a few links for the sake of discussing their content with the HN community, but they got flagged and I don't know the reason. Why does HN not allow posters to see the reason a post was flagged, or allow any discussion of whether the flag was appropriate or not? <comment><USER2> In general, posts are flagged because someone clicked the "flag" link so HN doesn't know any more specific reason.

Telling spammers why they were blocked just makes it easier for them to change their behavior just enough to not be blocked in the future. Telling crackpots why they were blocked just causes them to post multiple responses complaining about groupthink, free speech, and conspiracies. This has led basically all user generated content sites to have a policy of never explaining their moderation decisions. Of course this occasionally goes wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Which links? I looked at your submission story and I found:

(10 days ago) [flagged] [dead] NY Times Opinion Piece: "Trump? How Could We?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12609336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12609336) : No explanation in the thread. My guess is that the article is too political.

(15 days ago) [dupe] SpaceX has released the initial results of its investigation [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12570930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12570930) : Explained in the thread, it's a (not exact) dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567446)

(31 days ago) [dupe] [dead] Voteplz: Literally the easiest way to vote [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12456664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12456664) : Explained in the thread, it's a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454714)

(32 days ago) [dupe] No, really, the headphone jack is more useful than you think [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448453) : Not explained in the thread, probably (not exact) a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453311)

<comment><AUTHOR> For example, I would love to know about details about the following:

(84 days ago) [flagged] Turkey's president says all he wants is same powers as Hitler (telegraph.co.uk)

(48 days ago) [flagged] Tesla stock up 2% on news of upcoming announcement, down 1% after announcement (google.com)

I find it irritating (and it seems you've noticed this too) that "too- political" articles get flagged. Posting articles does not imply agreement with them. Are they not worth discussing?

<comment><USER3> From the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _What to Submit_

> _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

> _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they > 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or > disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's > probably off-topic._

The fist one "Turkey's president ..." I think it falls in the too political category. It doesn't matter if you or me agree or disagree with that article. An article that you or me agree with can be also too political. But that article is not [dead], it's only [flagged], so was less visible but not killed.

The second one "Tesla stock ..." is also [dead]. I can't see the URL. Looking only at the title it doesn't seams to obviously bad, but the URL is strange, because it's in google.com . Was it a google redirect? Was it a link to the google stock graph? Was there another article in the front page with a similar content? I'm not sure what happened with it.

Anyway, to get an authoritative response you can write to the mods: email@example.com That's also useful if you find a false positive and the vouch button doesn't unkill the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is especially relevant given last week's removal of Dash from the App Store</comment>


Using Spotify data to predict what songs will be hits - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2019-09-spotify-songs.html <comment><USER2> Did I miss something or does this project include popularity measures as _features_?

In the section on dataset features, they include "popularity" (calculated by Spotify) as well as Billboard chart stats like weeks, rank, and a custom-made "score". To me it's not clear whether these features were hidden from the train/test sets or whether the popularity features were only used in their "artist past performance" measures.

If they included these popularity features, it's like asking "can we predict whether a song is a hit just by looking at how popular it is?" If it is the case that they peeked into the future and observed ex-post song popularity, obtaining just 89% accuracy hints at how unpredictable song success truly is. Check out [1] for a famous study of song success which experimentally demonstrates the unpredictability of song success.

[1] Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. Science, 311(5762), 854–856. [https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066)

<comment><USER3> From the paper:

>To extend previous work, in addition to audio analysis features, we consider song duration and _mine an additional artist past-performance feature. Artist past-performance for a given song represents how many prior Billboard hits the artist has released before that track's release date_

emphasis mine.

I wonder how accurate a model using this feature alone would be.

<comment><USER2> Right, this sentence made it unclear to me whether they only used the popularity features to compute past-performance, or whether they included past-performance in addition to other popularity features.

To your question, other work on success prediction of tweets [1, 2] demonstrates that past-performance is indeed much more predictive than the typical content features. This way of looking at success of "cultural products" assumes it depends to varying extents on both inherent "quality" (measured by content features), and the social processes of sharing (which are much harder to understand ahead of time, as the paper I referenced in my parent post shows).

[1] Martin, T., Hofman, J. M., Sharma, A., Anderson, A., & Watts, D. J. (2016). Exploring Limits to Prediction in Complex Social Systems. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '16, 683–694. [https://doi.org/10.1145/2872427.2883001](https://doi.org/10.1145/2872427.2883001)

[2] Bakshy, E., Hofman, J. M., Mason, W. A., & Watts, D. J. (2011). Everyone's an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter. Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining - WSDM '11, 65. [https://doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935845](https://doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935845)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hah, my friend and I did nearly the exact same project in college, though minus the publication. We had an open ended project for an intro to machine learning class we were taking.

We ended up using the million song dataset, because I'm not sure Spotify gave out this data six years ago, which includes various info about roughly a million songs including artist, length, and supposedly Echonest api results for things like "dancyness". We then merged this with a list of something like 250k results of play counts. We then found out the Echonest data was quite literally all just set to null, so I went out to their api, signed up for a developer key, and spent six days querying to fill out our dataset.

We were massive novices to machine learning, so we basically were just script- kiddying it, and pretty much none of the models we made over a 24ish (because we were dumb college students doing things last minute) period had any significant accuracy. Finally we made a random forest model that was able to, with 80% accuracy, predict the "magnitude" of plays, ie roughly whether a song would get a million plays or a thousand.

When we broke it down (model explainability is an awesome feature) we found that out of everything interesting we had done with feature investigation and data cleaning etc, the model was about 90% based on which artist made the song. In retrospect, that makes sense, in a sort of cynical way; even a great song by an unknown artist rarely makes it big. The moral of the story I guess is that machine learning isn't magic

I still have all the data, and I've been meaning to revisit it now that I actually have a better understanding of the field. It's on my list of things to revisit/do, a very long list

<comment><USER5> "90% based on which artist made the song"

Doesn't that demonstrate that the actual business case of producers discovering new artists doesn't even factor into the model's case of discovering which new songs will actually be hits.

It seems like the former is much harder than the latter in this case.

<comment><USER6> I think you will find is that the process of an artist being discovered is basically the same as getting into YC.

It's about the artist and whether they have star quality and are saleable. There are plenty of song writers to write the actual songs.

Classic case is someone like Sia Furler who has written a ton of hits for other artists.

[https://time.com/4209769/sia-best-songs-written-for-other- ar...](https://time.com/4209769/sia-best-songs-written-for-other-artists- ranked/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An interesting '06 study. Participants were divided into groups and given access to obscure online songs. Some groups could see number of prior downloads.

Song popularity in different groups was very weakly correlated. Some of the same songs would sometimes be hits and sometimes busts for no apparent reason.

In other words, even song popularity (in an i.i.d. trial) doesn't predict song popularity.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/health/in-music-others- ta...](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/health/in-music-others-tastes-may- help-shape-your-own.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's crazy how much sway Spotify and other streaming apps have over the future of what music is popular. Radio pop hits aside, I know lots of people who's music preference is something along the lines of "a few bands I like and their associated Spotify recommendations". Music preferences and trends have always been culturally motivated both through grassroots word of mouth, and top-down by those creatively in charge at record labels.

But now with algorithmic suggestions there is a third trend-motivator, which is music listeners and music producers reflecting on the overall system for statistical trends and correlations. I expect this motivator to push out the other two because it makes labels more (and safer) money and consumers seem to like it. The conditions for success are now highly metricked and quickly A/B testable. It's like the internet before and after PageRank—and just the same, I would expect a cottage industry of "SEO" to pop up for the music industry.

<comment><USER9> I'll take algorithms over payola. At least they suggest things to me that I'd like to hear.

<comment><USER10> Really? Ed Sheeran is so good that he had 5 of the top 10 hits simultaneously?

If that's the end result, I think we need to bring back payola.

<comment><USER9> meh? Charts have always been poor representations of musical quality/popularity. I use spotify because the algorithms suggest me good music based on my taste, and despite the weird polarity of it they always find new music that interests me.

I have no problem with Spotify's algorithms. They do a very good job with a very difficult problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Per the paper, in regards to fixing the data set imbalance:

> In order to balance our data, we randomly sampled 12,000 non-hits from the > Spotify data and created a new dataset. This dataset contained approximately > 12k non-hits and 12k hits (∼24k tracks total).

Won't a indiscriminate random sampling of the non-hits introduce a temporal sampling bias, as a) music trends change over time and b) music output is not equal across years?

<comment><USER12> I was thinking along the same lines but in general.

How do you account for the linearity of humans judging against and liking things that we've heard before, excluding the things we haven't heard from the future?

Do we trust that SVM/NN account for it somehow?

Is there a way to limit corpora or have a point in time training set i.e. only against inputs that precede it.

Of course this could just be a fine tuning knob against the other temporal style/fashion trends you would expect in the data-set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, more motion towards ever more boring music in bulk and more marginalisation of quirky, weird, different, interesting, intelligent music. Yeah, progress. :-(

</comment><comment><USER14> Step 2: Train a GAN to try to fool the classifier: instant hit generator?

<comment><USER15> Check the new hit by artist Justin Timberbrook: Baby You!

Lyrics

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Hey baby you \ Summer sun beatin' down \ I texted my ex the other night \ Going down to the bar to see if I can hook up

<1 second burst of static>

I like the way you shake it \ (Shake it, shake it, shake it) \ Got dolla dolla bills in area codes \ Yeah

<Sirens and machine gun noises>

<comment><USER16> Not going to lie, you got me. Thought that was real until the last line.</comment></comment>


This must disappear - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/Bno5rqB.png With a habit of highlighting text while reading - this is by far the most irritating thing I've ever seen.<p>I know I'm not alone. <comment><USER2> Easily done, log out of Medium and the popup on selection will go away.

I'm not quite sure what is so terrible about it as you can still do all of your normal selection actions with no modification and the whole purpose of the selection+popup is to facilitate further discussion of specific phrases within an article.

And, while I know it's easy to hate on social media like Twitter, Medium is the new project by the founder of Twitter and you _have_ to have a Twitter account to sign up for it in any case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, easily done.

Problem is highlighting is slow. It ruins the way I (and many others) browse... I'd love to see stats on how many actually use this rubbish (annoyance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the ways I deal with being severely dyslexic is by highlighting each line of words as I read. For this reason alone, I can't stand contextual menus appearing when I draw a selection.

On a completely separate note, people tweeting should be very comfortable with command-c command-v, and everyone else should be too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nailed it!

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

I doubt even those who tweet use this widget. As useless as {'Share','Follow','Like','Digg'}

As the title says, this _must_ go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is probably a chrome extension out there that can block this.

Or even better a grease monkey script if anyone still uses that.

To get grease monkey scripts on chrome search up black canvas and obviously userscripts.org

<comment><USER5> There is a Safari (Mac) extension for this called JSBlacklist as well.

[https://code.google.com/p/jsblacklist/downloads/list](https://code.google.com/p/jsblacklist/downloads/list)

Just enter in the domain to block it. Up to you to find the domain though, if it's not in the default list.</comment></comment>


Jeffrey Goldberg's sequel to "the Resistance" - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/-are-any-parts-of-your-body-sore-asks-the-man-from-tsa/65482/

<comment><USER2> There seems to be a growing resistence to these machines (lots of chatter here, reddit, etc) but at the same time they are becoming more commonplace. I have always thought of airplane travel as an option domestically (you can always drive) and been willing to subject myself to a few security checks as a condition. I would agree that these machines just go too far--if you choose to fly on an airplane you either have to a) subject yourself to irradiated humiliation or b) have someone touch your "junk".

As long as the "opt-out" is an option, there is an opportunity for a popular revolt. If everyone (or even a very small portion) of travellers began opting out, they would quickly either: a) force everyone to use them (which they are apparently doing in some locations) or b) go back to the standard metal detectors. If they force everyone to go through them and a lawsuit arises, the judicial system would have a chance to weigh in on it.

Someone should make a website, a catchy slogan, and some stickers and get the uprising going...</comment>


Bob Iger, the man who animated Disney - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/robert-iger-disney-ceo-ride-lifetime-autobiography-review <comment><USER2> I worked at Disney for many years. Fun fact: Disney has no CTO...just EVPs per division. This is, in part, because Iger considers himself the CTO Of Disney. That may seem funny to HN, because you'll never hear him say anything about Kubernetes or Cloud, but he's made some pretty big technology bets in his tenure that have delivered on Disney's goals. Disney+ is actually the product of a 2B acquisition of BAMTech. Disney also has a pretty huge chunk of high end graphics tech thanks to investments in ILM, Pixar, and Animation. XLab is another source of tech innovation.

Disney doesn't tend to get enough credit as a tech company because to them tech takes a back seat to entertainment in the public eye. That can be frustrating and humbling as an engineer, at times, but its definitely enlightening.

<comment><USER3> > _Disney doesn't tend to get enough credit as a tech company because to them > tech takes a back seat to entertainment in the public eye. That can be > frustrating and humbling as an engineer, at times, but its definitely > enlightening._

Weren't Bob Iger and Steve Jobs close or at least friends?

That kind of echoes Jobs' sentiment about "technology alone is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing."

Tech to these guys is a means to a goal.

<comment><USER4> Bob Iger and Steve Jobs were very close friends. I heard an interview of Bob Iger on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon where he spoke at length about his friendship with Steve Jobs [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b0c9#play](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b0c9#play)

<comment><USER5> Steve Jobs on storytelling and Disney's monopoly on the business: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-stories-about- people...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-stories-about-people- randomly-or-non-randomly-meeting-Steve-Jobs/answer/Tomas-Higbey)

<comment><USER6> That was when Steve and the CEO before Bob didn't get together... Steve did sell Pixar to Disney after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I highly recommend his recent book! Had no idea how close he was to Steve Jobs and it is incredible how Bob/Steve changed Disney.

</comment><comment><USER7> also about Iger's Disney [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to- break-up-disn...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up- disney-part)

<comment><USER8> Nice article. One point:

> Disney will have to lose money it could otherwise make in order to > differentiate its streaming service.

> Such a move cuts against much industrial organizational economic theory. > Theorists posit that corporations like Disney tend not to intentionally lose > money just to acquire market power, because foregoing revenue is not, > apparently, rational. This theory is nonsense. After all, if Disney is > willing to tolerate losses just to drive competitors out of business, then > vertical foreclosure is deeply problematic, and perhaps illegal.

The reason it's not typically rational is that you have no guarantee of being able to maintain your monopoly once you've cornered the market. As soon as you raise prices to recoup your losses, competitors will come out of the woodwork. This is not the case with media companies though, because they have a government enforced 95 year monopoly on their content.

If Disney were to put Netflix out of business, buy Netflix's content, and then raise their Disney+ service price, I cannot legally setup a competing service to stream Netflix's old content.

TL;DR: The economic theory that says predatory pricing is usually irrational assumes fungible goods, but media is not fungible.

<comment><USER9> > media is not fungible.

It could be. Imagine a world where movies don't cost millions of dollars to make.

<comment><USER8> It's not about costs. Regardless of budget, I can't make a star wars movie.

<comment><USER9> Imagine a world where you _could_.

It's a tooling problem more than a budget one.

In fifty years I think we'll be telling the machines what stories we want to experience. But between now and that dreamy future, there are intermediate points along the path that empower individual or small groups of creatives to lift mountains - I think of it much in the same way as languages and tools and libraries make it so we don't have to string together vacuum tubes to solve our problems. Think about the kinds of problems filmmakers face: writing a cohesive narrative, finding and lighting a scene, editing massive amounts of video. It's all just a problem of tooling.

When there is a way that lets you or anyone with an ounce of creativity turn their dreams into polished, watchable content, it will democratize storytelling.

<comment><USER10> The tools and even the content itself don't really seem to be the fulcrum of a content business. As thousands of derivativr pop songs and mediocre AAA video games attest, it's all about distribution. Those are industries where the tools are already democratized and it doesn't matter. Building, acquiring, partnering with, monopolizing the largest distribution channels wins you the revenue war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is it that every post about a company ( Disney today, Stripe yesterday, Microsoft, Gitlab, Bloomberg, , etc ), the top comment is always a PR-style praise of the company?

It's always "I used to work at and so and so is great" or "I know someone who worked at and so and so is great".

<comment><USER12> Seen anything about china/hong kong in the news lately? Seen a lot anout pro blizzard/pro disney?</comment></comment>


Basic introduction to TMUX - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yashwate07/basic-introduction-to-tmux-5c1d943ddeec <comment><USER2> Also prefix-[0-9] is used for navigating windows, not panes.

</comment><comment><USER2> You mean "tmux detach" not just "detach". Also it is prefix+: not just :. Also there is no attach keyboard shortcut,not prefix-a.

Not sure why you keep putting tmux in all caps but whatever floats your boat there.</comment>


Bribery Attacks on Bitcoin Consensus [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BFGKN14-bitcoin_bribery.pdf <comment><USER2> "Explaining the lack of such attacks in practice requires significant additional modeling assumptions."

Yes, the main assumption being that burning such huge resources would in any way be recouped by a simple double spend.

A double spending attack, as the name implies, simply allows you to spend twice the same amount of bitcoins. Thus, "an attacker [who] can purchase mining power" needs to be able to do so at a lower cost than the value of the bitcoins he will spend for the second time. Obviously, considering the hashrate and the fact that you need around 51% of it, or, 30% of it according to some calculations, I can't envisage any scenario where such a cost would in any way be justified by simply spending your own coins twice.

Moreover, one has to consider that if such hashing power was used to simply do what it is meant to do, then the attacker would be supplied with fresh new bitcoins, probably to the tune of far more than any amount he can double spend.

That is why "the Bitcoin protocol is a stable Nash Equilibrium."

<comment><USER3> You can convert BTC to cash. You can cash out all of your bitcoins twice instead of once. That means at least that everyone who is profitably mining bitcoins now should have an incentive to be doing this.

<comment><USER4> cashing large amount of bitcoins is slow process. cashing small amount does not make enough to cover processing power required to double spend.

<comment><USER5> Since individual Bitcoin transactions can be as large as you like, you could conceivably double-spend tens of thousands of BTC in a single block. It's possible or even likely that there's nobody who would actually give you cash equivalents for tens of thousands of BTC without more precautions, but I don't see a clear limitation in the Bitcoin technology itself to limit how lucrative an isolated double spending attack could be.

<comment><USER6> I think confirmation count does a good job of this, allowing processors to choose the balance between risk and convenience. No one's going to convert large fiat to btc without increasing confirmation count, and splitting smaller transactions will require setting up traceable account. Unless of course the attacker launders thru alt-coins, but then you might run into liquidity issues.

<comment><USER3> I think confirmation count isn't so useful when one person or pool owns something close to 50% of the hashing power. Everyone gets complacent because they can't launch a 51% attack, but it's possible for someone with 40% of the power to effectively pull off the exact same attack for a span of six blocks. It is improbable, but not _that_ improbable.

<comment><USER6> Writing six blocks in a row doesn't mean you can double spend a transaction with six confirmations. Unless you meant something else.

<comment><USER3> That is pretty much what I meant. If you can write your own confirmations, why not?

<comment><USER6> Miners would have to mine valid blocks secretly, risking never receiving a payout unless x-consecutive blocks have been mined. I mean it's technically possible, just economically infeasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All the discussed attacks (51%, selfish mining etc) are working under assumption of a relatively short _time preference_ of a miner (how long he is willing to wait for ROI). In practice, though, there is no stable condition when you have miners of varying time preferences.

Miners with longer time preference are willing to tolerate greater difficulty increases and invest more in mining and generally will go out of business later than miners with shorter outlook. This creates a feedback loop which quickly leaves in business only the most hardcore investors doing mining. This provides a foundation for "rational behaviour", that is decision-making for long-term value of Bitcoin.

In other words, economics of mining leave among miners only the biggest believers in bitcoin driving out lesser believers. That's why in practice all miners are "honest" \- all of them have dug the deepest hole possible, none is interested in short-term "profit" from double spending that would not return even a fraction of their investment.

<comment><USER8> > In other words, economics of mining leave among miners only the biggest > believers in bitcoin driving out lesser believers. That's why in practice > all miners are "honest" \- all of them have dug the deepest hole possible, > none is interested in short-term "profit" from double spending that would > not return even a fraction of their investment.

GHash already conducted a 49% attack against a gambling site. [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0) They blamed a rogue employee - but then the claim is no longer "miners would never do that, it wouldn't be in their self-interest" but "no single person at any mining concern would do that, it wouldn't be in the mining concern's self- interest even if it it was in their own". Which of course isn't true. (It isn't true in the wider financial system either, which is why regulations exist.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note that all currencies are susceptible to these types of attacks. In practice, they are prevented by the massive transaction costs involved.

<comment><USER10> Not all. Some cryptocurrencies are Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work. This means that in order to try and do a 51% attack, the attacker must have 51% of the staking coins. PoS uses magnitudes less electricity than PoW and game theory suggests it's just as, if not more, secure.

<comment><USER11> Far less secure you mean? [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Poelstra's "paper" is pretty controversial: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2zpmlj/expanded_re...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2zpmlj/expanded_rewrite_of_distributed_consensus_from/cplj4ug)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My Weekend Project, AutoSSL - <AUTHOR> https://autossl.co <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here. While building my current startup, we had this requirement to offer custom domains to our users. We also wanted to serve those domains over HTTPS. After days of searching and brainstorming, I had no luck! I found a couple of potential solutions but they were either too expensive or too complicated.

So, I spent a few weeks building an in house solution that automates the whole process of provisioning and renewing SSL certs for our users. It involves Let's Encrypt and has been working great so far!

Last week I thought of offering this as a SaaS product. With the help of my friend, I coded an app where customers can add their domains in a few steps. It's live at [https://autossl.co](https://autossl.co). Once a domain is added to our system, we generate a CNAME record for that domain. When the domain is accessed for the first time, we generate an SSL cert on demand through Let's Encrypt and renew it every 3 months. I also expose APIs to add domains to our system. So, if you are a SaaS company offering custom domains to your customers, you can completely automate SSL issuance in an easy and cost effective way.

I think it has got some potential. What do you think?

<comment><USER2> Cool website for a weekend project - what tools did you use to make it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using Caddy internally in fleet mode and Node.js. Caddy takes care of SSL negotiation, provisioning, and renewals. My Node.js app sits behind Caddy and proxies requests to the origin. I am trying to create an edge network where SSL is negotiated at a location that is closest to the users. Caddy is battle- tested, but managing multiple Caddy servers, monitoring them and backing up the certs can become cumbersome. That's the reason I am trying to automate the whole process for businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The branding is confusing. AutoSSL is a very popular feature with WHM/cPanel, so many shared hosting providers offer their "AutoSSL" service.

Additionally, Let's Encrypt is a partner with cPanel's AutoSSL, so even more confusion may arise out of that.

For example: [https://www.google.com/search?q=autossl](https://www.google.com/search?q=autossl)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea. My startup started with managed hosting. We use to provide subdomains of customer.company.com domain for each customer to quickly onboard users. Later, when the customer was ready to move to their own domain, we had to ask them to setup A records or provide DNS credentials. The tech stack wasn't too hard for us but hand holding each customer to get the custom domain working was the pain point.

* Will AutoSSL also provide a way for the customer to login and provide them instructions on how they can setup the domain on their side?

* Some of our customers had CAA records preventing LE from working. This is about informing the customer that this record exists and what the possible alternatives are.

* This was mentioned elsewhere but AutoSSL is a cPanel feature. So, I would consider rebranding.

* What are the proxying limitations? Does it support Websockets? How much load can it handle?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

> Will AutoSSL also provide a way for the customer to login and provide them > instructions on how they can set up the domain on their side?

Yes, I expose two APIs - add and delete. When your customer adds a domain, you can hit our API to whitelist it. The API responds back with CNAME instructions. Your app just needs to pick it up and display it to the users.

> What are the proxying limitations? Does it support Websockets? How much load > can it handle?

I have 5 servers right now that handle TLS and fetch content from the origin. I just did a load testing with about 20K requests per minute, and it did fine. Will do more tests as I move forward. But before doing anything just wanted to know if anyone is actually going to use the product. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's an interesting fresh idea in the "auto-renew TLS certs" market. (And the website looks superb!) A few thoughts:

\- If I were a service provider I wouldn't wanna be dependent on a third party service for something as basic as TLS certs. I'm not an expert in your domain but to me this looks like something that could happily coexist as a service with a self-hostable (possibly FOSS) option (since the convenience advantage of a service is still there).

\- Security: Can you read my customers' traffic? (A self-hosted option could also help with this for high-sensitivity use cases).

\- What about rate limits? My customers could be in a situation where the standard LE rate limits are already pretty tight. Can I (and subsequently my customers) see/manage how much quota AutoSSL is using?

<comment><USER6> COmpanies buy "security" "turnkey" solutions all the time, why would this be anything different?

All that networking hardware terminating SSL between external and internal traffic can also read all a company's traffic, but I guess Cisco or some chinese manufacturer is more trustworthy...right?

... not affliated with the OP at all.

Some of the security groups at major fort-500 companies I've worked at were run by people that could powerpoint well, graduated from surfing suitcase schools, and showed no awareness of even mass media security failings (heartbleed).

You'd think these divisions would have extremely smart PhD level security folks that could follow the basics of what the attacks used, but they were all just people that did vendor RFPs, made dumb policies (8 char max password, only use approved versions of software that were already out of date and had known vulnerabilities, internal password change site wouldn't show in Chrome because the cipher suite was hopelessly compromised)

<comment><USER5> A difference between on-prem solutions like networking hardware and outsourced services is that the on-prem solution doesn't phone home (at least not the processed data hopefully).

Different idea though: Shouldn't GDPR data processing agreements cover these sorts of cases?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, a few comments:

\- Branding as SSL is confusing, SSL is dead. TLS is the replacement.

\- SaaSes can just front their apps with [https://caddyserver.com/v1/docs/automatic- https](https://caddyserver.com/v1/docs/automatic-https)

\- Writeup of a SaaS using Caddy for this instead: [https://ohdear.app/blog/how-we-used-caddy-and-laravels- subdo...](https://ohdear.app/blog/how-we-used-caddy-and-laravels-subdomain- routing-to-serve-our-status-pages)

<comment><USER4> There's also [https://github.com/containous/traefik](https://github.com/containous/traefik) (caddy is awesome too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >SSL is terminated at an edge location that is closest to the users.

So this is routing plain text http for most of the connection and at the same time giving the managed _edge location_ direct access to the traffic _and_ a valid tls cert for the domain? Isn't that mostly snake oil then, as the secure connection never originates from the target service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi.. The TLS is terminated at the edge, and from that point we fetch the data from origin server. As long as the origin has SSL, the communication is secure end-to-end.

<comment><USER9> you're talking about "piecewise end-to-end".

the "end"s are the _browser_ and the _origin_, and if there isn't a single secure channel that goes all the way between them, that's not "end to end".

I mean take the "piecewise" argument to its natural conclusion.

If the reason it's okay for you to be in the middle is that you're going to ensure that your request to origin is also encrypted, why should you be the only party in between that can decrypt the contents of the connection?

Why not let the ISP also decrypt the contents? What about the layer 3 interconnect providers? How about your cable modem and your router (they're _probably_ patched 'enough' that it's safe to let them see your plaintext).

I'm harping because misuse of the term "end to end" is _actually dangerous_ to real people.

All of this is to say nothing of the fact that when you allow "middle-boxes", the client no longer has control over the ciphers that are used for the end- to-end connection, so they lose control over perfect forward secrecy.

<comment><USER9> you might say,

> but this is what cloudflare does!

yes, and it already caused one of the worst breaches in the short history of the internet [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "vanity" domain? Only big corps are real; all else is vanity?

Seems like yet another betrayal of the end-to-end principle (as is this product for that matter)

<comment><USER6> Come on, all domains are vanity.

<comment><USER10> Good point: we can't use IP addresses as machines may move but domain names should have been generated at time of request, _à la_ lisp gensyms: G001.com, G002.com. Perhaps randomize the numerical component to avoid gaming the system.

Is it too late to make this switch? Names are sort of like that in China.

<comment><USER11> Names are like that in China because they are puns and rhymes for Chinese words. It's easier to remember for people who don't know pinyin and quicker to input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would have said that the companies who would most benefit of this is also be the company who should not outsource this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Possible bug report:

From the home page, I click the "Features" link, then press the back button on my browser. It returns a blank white page with the text: "An unexpected error has occurred." No other links seem to do this (probably has something to do with the hash url).

I'm on Windows 10 using the latest Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting niche. I wouldn't use it because I don't want my customer's web traffic dependent on your edge servers being up, available, and not overloaded with the traffic of your other customers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great idea! Wishing you a lot of luck!

</comment><comment><USER16> "So, I spent a few weeks building an in house solution". That's not a weekend project. So you just stated it was get more attention for yourself... that's little dishonest isn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have actually been using it for our existing product [https://hashnode.com/devblog](https://hashnode.com/devblog). So, I thought why not let everyone use it? That's when I spent my weekend coding an app that lets customers sign up and add their domains. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes no sense. TLS termination should be done locally at the site, not at some random server on another end of the internet. It doesn't make any website safer, it is literally a man-in-the-middle.

<comment><USER18> Also, and not that a bit of competition is bad, but doesn't Cloudflare already provide this service?

<comment><USER19> Yes, starting at $5000 per month...</comment></comment></comment>


Reducing Asynchronous Miscommunication - <AUTHOR> https://www.friday.app/asynchronous-miscommunication <comment><USER2> Tip #1 includes the example of "Your boss just threw you a curveball and you have no idea what to say", tip #3 is to use emojis and gifs, especially to avoid misinterpretations. Do people send gifs to their curve-ball throwing bosses? :) (Also I feel that emojis might actually lead to _more_ misinterpretations in async communications.)</comment>


The Beautiful Table - communicating football statistics with D3.js - <AUTHOR> http://the-beautiful-table.com

<comment><USER3> Sorry, this site is only viewable in Chrome or Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Technically it works on Firefox, however, importing SVG from URLs and resizing them, which I do for the club crests, wasn't working in Firefox correctly. So, instead of having a half working project, I decided to force Webkit browsers.

<comment><USER4> _So, instead of having a half working project, I decided to force Webkit browsers._

You realize that you still have a half working project, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First of all these are soccer stats, not football at all. So I call B.S.

Secondly, in all seriousness... While pretty, they are quite hard to make any actual use of. Things that should be compared are far from each other and oriented differently making them difficult to compare. Trends are hard to notice because everything is so widely spaced. The losing team score is too faint so it fades from the vision.

But yes, it is pretty.

<comment><USER6> Funnily enough, in most countries where 'soccer' is popular, it is called by some local direct translation of the word football: football (UK, France), futbol (Latin America, Spain), and Fußball (Germany). And this makes sense, because in 'soccer', the ball is mostly played with the foot. American Football, on the other hand, has the ball mostly played with the hand and only the USA refers to the game as 'soccer', which is an anachronism stemming from the English turn-of-the-century phrase "Association Football" - now long defunct in its homeland. And that shows how often Americans speak English that originated in England but is no longer used there, having been supplanted by continentalisms over the course of decades and centuries - <USER2> <http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/adventure-of-english/>

Of course, you're stuck as to what to call American Football, because handball is now a completely different sport that is popular in central europe, but never really cracked the anglosphere.

Completely off-topic, I know, but interesting nonetheless. There's probably some analogy that can be drawn here between common names for things and the various display ports that are used and fail to be standardised upon, but I am too tired to find it :-)

<comment><USER7> How about American Rugby?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Look, I'm going to be critical in this comment, so let me preface my remarks by saying something nice: this work seems to demonstrate that you have some coding chops. Additionally, you seem to have a good sense of aesthetic, because the data visualization does, in fact, look pretty.

However, I'm a bit put off by it. You mention Tufte, but then you have 16 step explanation of what the data visualization actually is and what it is intended to show. Your chart doesn't really convey any meaning to me when I look at it because it's unclear what the axes actually are, what the opacity is supposed to represent, and the little number on the side makes no sense unless you hover over it. You've succeed in making a chart very pretty but I feel that you may have stumbled a bit in making it comprehensible.

Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool!

If you could combine it with historical data, you could make a fortune selling data to pro-gamblers ;-)

<http://www.football-data.co.uk/downloadm.php>

Betegy.com are a site already doing statistical analysis for predictive purposes across 5 major European leagues.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice. I think it's a pretty elegant way to display sporting events.

The readability of the data is highly affected by color though. The data for teams with light colors or teams that lose often are very washed out. The lack of contrast makes it hard to easily read at a glance.

A switch to show the team on a single side of the x-axis would also be useful for showing trends.

</comment><comment><USER11> I naively was expecting this to be American Football stats due to my deep Midwestern roots. Plus was sad Firefox was left out to dry.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very nice - although I'm not too sure what it's trying to communicate to me.

Btw, did you have to pay for your stats?

<comment><USER13> How can it be nice if you've no idea what it is conveying?

<comment><USER12> By nice, I meant that the presentation was nice and clean. And I understood each individual piece of data but I am unsure if I was supposed to identify a trend amongst teams or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Adding to the disappointment, but I was hoping to see a really good example of using D3 for tabular data, updated in real time from JS (such as from Ember) without re-rendering the entire DIV.

</comment><comment><USER15> because i'm a programmer rather than a graphic designer, i don't judge beauty by the rendered image; in other words, whether this qualifies as beautiful or not depends in large part on the code that created it--e.g., is the code a reliable and straightforward re-useable template such that the data as well as the data source can change without breaking?

you went to a lot of trouble to prepare a detailed explanation of your creative process; have you made the code available?

</comment><comment><USER16> Any chance of getting MLS in there?

</comment><comment><USER17> Does not work on IE :(</comment>


Poll: Keyboard shortcuts for hacker news? - <AUTHOR>

Is there interest for keyboard shortcuts on the hacker news site?
I really appreciate the clean minimalist interface for hacker news.  I can understand why most UI suggestions for the site would not be liked.  But, it seems that adding keyboard shortcuts would be a natural UI component for users around here without detracting from the site's simplicity.
Are there shortcuts that I just don't know about?  I tried searching for it, but didn't see anything.
I often find myself typing "gi" on hacker news by accident (the shortcut in gmail to take you back to the inbox).  When I do that, it always reminds me that it would be nice if there were shortcuts for hacker news.  In particular, it'd be great if I could type something like "g23" to go to article number 23.  And it'd be cool if I could use "j" and "k" to move a cursor up and down the list with which I could select the article or the comments link.
I know that I could just write a browser plugin or bookmarklet to do it, but do others have interest in this tool? <comment><AUTHOR> vote: I think keyboard shortcuts would be a nice addition to the hacker news site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> vote: I don't think it's a worth it to add keyboard shortcuts to hacker news</comment>


Wall Street is pitching in for the climate crisis - <AUTHOR> https://cassandraxia.com/writing/divestment-vs-engagement.html <comment><USER2> best article on the website</comment>


Ask HN:Whither Tech? - <AUTHOR>

Marking up text, printing, publishing, and distributing used to be their own world. A world with its own advances and efficiencies, but in 1920 one would probably not mistake it for "tech" of its day. That would probably be radio and air travel.
I find it odd that typesetting concerns have become superimposed on hard engineering and the sciences as "tech." The scale of social interaction made possible by the internet revolution has turned some things on their heads. An outside observer of our post-modern information-based economy might be taken aback that large-scale socializing seems to have supplanted what used to pass for tech just 30 years ago in the popular imagination.
Wither tech? Just because 100 million people can give the world status every morning,  all of a sudden you can run machine learning algorithms on that great river of output and extract profit from the banality.
I was 8 in 78, and so my 20's were spent twiddling markup and CSS, instead of twiddling programmable ROMs. Does anyone but me regret this? I never imagined that I would spend a lot of my life doing cyber type-setting, or reading the musings of other typesetters.
update - Ten years ago there was a site like HN where someone asked a question like this: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/8/19/54354/3995 <comment><USER2> CSS is actually a complicated thing. have you read PBrowser's papers on it and checked out their formalized subset BSS?</comment>


Concentrichron: A clock and calendar made of concentric rings - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Vector_GL/status/1239512837325758464 <comment><USER2> This would make a pretty awesome large format wall clock. Anyone know if anything like that exists? If so, I imagine it would be pretty expensive since it's value would mostly be aesthetic.

<comment><USER3> That wall clock would need to handle different month lengths somehow because the month ring can be 28, 29, 30 or 31 days, and provide for a way to add years to the outer ring.

Probably regarding months, it would likely do what a lot of mechanical watches do: go to 31, and require manual intervention to set the day of month.

That's kind of ugly because you have to rotate that wheel exactly to retain the fractional part of the day, which is hard to accurately other than at midnight.

<comment><USER4> With some 'smart' circuitry this can be handled automatically: the month ring should have 31 days. But if the month is shorter, the clock would jump automatically to the next month.

<comment><USER5> Though I love the idea of doing it mechanically like the Long Now clock:

[https://longnow.org/artifacts/equation-of-time- cam](https://longnow.org/artifacts/equation-of-time-cam)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool! I hesitate to self-link, but this is too related -- I have long had a similar but way smaller, less featureful (just a time-clock), and shoddily written design on my homepage: [https://wcarss.ca](https://wcarss.ca)

<comment><USER7> I appreciate that you just have a "log".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Direct link [http://www.concentrichron.com/](http://www.concentrichron.com/)

<comment><USER9> It's quite impressive, beautiful and smooth in motion.

I have to second what someone else said, it could be made into an amazing wall clock (and even a small desk unit). There is a lot that could be optionally (settings) done to manipulate its aesthetic qualities in various directions to match personal preferences, times of day, events, and so on.

<comment><USER10> I have the complete OPPOSITE experience: the motion is jerky and inconsistent, like the seconds are struggling then catch up. (Firefox 74 on Windows 10 18363)

<comment><USER11> Concur. Since someone described it as 'beautiful and smooth' I opened it in Chrome.. beautiful and smooth (80% of the time). Since it's "just" SVG transforms perhaps this is a firefox:chrome difference (that said, I've built SVG transforms that run fine on both). It does invent the universe 31.25 times/second.. perhaps there's some JS optimizations we can do. [Update: basically smooth in IE11 too]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of sculpture I used to walk by almost daily in grad school, Maya Lin's timetable. [https://www.flickr.com/photos/rocor/3546093103/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rocor/3546093103/)

</comment><comment><USER13> It is animated with Javascript by updating transform:rotation every ~30ms. Couldn't the current time be set with Javascript and the animation be handled with CSS animations? Maybe CSS animations are not accurate enough time-wise so that the clock would diverge from the actual time (or other bad stuff happens like animations being suspended while a tab has no focus. I'm out of web development for too long to know off-hand how that behaves)?

<comment><USER10> Or similarly, let SVG animation transforms do it for us:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/ani...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/animateTransform)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On months with less than 31 days, when the third ring in hits the last day of the month, it just skips to the first?

<comment><USER15> The Javascript just recomputes a new absolute rotational position for the rings on every update. So in effect it is always skipping, so it would skip in that case like all others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Super lazy night mode, paste this in your console:

        var strokeTable = {
          "#000000": "#AEAEAE",
          "#F5F5F5": "#252525",
          "#FAFAFA": "#2A2A2A",
        }
        Object.entries(strokeTable).forEach(([o, n])=>Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(`[stroke="${o}"]`)).forEach((e)=>e.style.stroke = n))
        Object.entries(strokeTable).forEach(([o, n])=>Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(`[fill="${o}"]`)).forEach((e)=>e.style.fill = n))
        document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#050505"
        document.getElementById("test").style.backgroundColor = "#050505"

<comment><USER17> Not only is it very beautiful, but you made me use the browser console for the first time in my life and it feels great! Thank you.

Off to read some of my bookmarklets, quarantine-style rabbit-hole time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks reminiscent of a slide rule!

Very graceful in how it shows the interaction between the different lengths and frequencies of cycles (eg, days of week, months)

I wonder how they handle the changing number of days per month.. always keep 31, and just skip the extras every other month?

<comment><USER19> They always keep 31, but skip past it:

            var fdate = (d.getDate() - 1.0) + fhours / 24.0;
            document.getElementById('date').setAttribute("transform", "rotate(" + fdate / 31.0 * -360.0 + ", 400,300)");

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every UI toolkit on Windows is/was based on Win32 (except XAML). There are so many places where it leaks it's not even funny anymore.

UI consistency isn't Windows strongest point. I'm glad they're trying to fix it.

<comment><USER21> what UI failure is letting you comment on a wrong thread? Is there a mobile app where nav is more obtuse or something?

<comment><USER20> haha indeed! the iOS HN app

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The cognitive load to be able to read the calendar is quite high. It took me a few seconds to tell what the date/time is. It's very cool, but I am not sure if this is good design.

<comment><USER23> Good point but think of it like this how many years have you looked at the other type of analog clock, in comparison.

<comment><USER22> I prefer boring that works vs. new that doesn't work.

What would be cool if the new thing worked really well _and_ it was different/interesting.

This design is only the latter, hence the slight disdain. But, I applaud the work that went into it.

<comment><USER24> It's not that it doesn't work. It actually works better than the old way. You think it doesn't work because you're not used it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love this. But part of me wants the rings to rotate the other direction. I don't know why. It's kind of like scrolling I guess, is the content moving one way, or is the view window moving the other way.

By rotating counter clock wise, the information (the current time) advances clockwise. I don't know if I'd like it better the other way, but a certain part of me is so used to seeing the actual mechanical movement be clockwise, that I want the rings to move clockwise.

Am I alone in this?

<comment><USER26> That would feel wrong to me. If it rotated that way, when looking at the rings, the future would be on the left, and the past on the right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It would be neat to add highlighting for each of the current parts.

<comment><USER28> I made this, which should be fairly easy to tweak to your desired look (the svg is generated by the script): [https://jsfiddle.net/4e6kw8Ls/](https://jsfiddle.net/4e6kw8Ls/) (click to toggle zoom)

<comment><USER27> Sweet work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is cool. My friend and I once visualized our timeslot with our product roadmap on a circular timescale.

For those looking for something similar on your devices, there is an app called "Circa" \- [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/circa-time-zone- converter/id96...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/circa-time-zone- converter/id968698352)

Circa³ shows timezones, the overlaps, and your selected calendar events.

</comment><comment><USER30> Someone make me this watch, with an open center and gears. You can drop the year dial and maybe the seconds...

<comment><USER31> Not open center but [https://www.klokers.com/en/3-watches](https://www.klokers.com/en/3-watches)

Add few zeroes to the price and you probably could get a skeletonized one too

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just one more ring (2020s, 2030s...2110s) to drive home the vulnerable sense of mortality

</comment><comment><USER33> Neat. Natural. Suggestions:

Add timer and stopwatch features. Maybe calendar sync.

Time zones.

Try also making option to break the red line instead of rotating disks.

Possibly also color customization. An added gradient may be more intuitive than only numbers.

Edit: and existential angst checkbox

</comment><comment><USER34> Agree to all - also, showing (continuous) progress within the year is eye opening.

</comment><comment><USER35> And the best thing is, if you read it from the top down, it's in ISO-8601!

</comment><comment><USER36> It would be dope if someone could make this in brass.

<comment><USER37> Would love to see the Clickspring channel on YouTube do a series on this. If you aren't familiar with Chris's work, he's got a series on a wonderful clock he made, mostly brass. Fun to watch. Apparently his machining techniques aren't great but I'm no machinist so doesn't matter to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Seems to be down from the load. Cool, though.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks great, please add black theme and step/diamater size for seconds 5,10,15 seconds to reduce motion

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting. I wonder how it handles the number of days in a month being variable?

<comment><USER41> Usually, (on smoothly geared watches) they jump past the intervening day(s) and start smoothly incrementing again. The counter example would be a year's leap second, which would need to delay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Very nice, and even better if you just show the top 15°

Android widget please!

</comment><comment><USER43> And every ten years you replace the year ring?

</comment><comment><USER44> 3d prints anybody ?

</comment><comment><USER45> Very cool!

It's slightly marred by a typo: "Tueday" is missing an "s". Unfortunately I don't see contact info except a twitter handle, and I don't speak tweetish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks! Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> From a design point of view, reading this clock is strictly harder than reading:

"2020 March 16th, Monday 10:50:48"

and also provides no useful extra information, unlike a traditional clock face.

<comment><USER22> Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's a fact - it's objectively harder to read.

This criticism is valid and although the clock is super cool, it's bad design. Does that mean we shouldn't do projects like this? No. Is it important to highlight the problems with design like this? Yes.

<comment><USER47> "Bad design" is just your opinion, not objective fact. If every clock were designed specifically for its ability to be read easily, there would only be one type of clock, with high contrast colors, perhaps in different sizes.

Good design involves trade offs. Many of those trade offs are opposing factors like form, function, cost, versatility, etc. And not all of those trade offs are worth it for everyone. E.g. adding a diamond to a watch will increase it's cost many times over and distract from reading the time. But that trade off is worth it for some people. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it bad design.

<comment><USER22> Good design is about how a thing works, not what it looks like. This calendar and clock does not work well - I am willing to bet my entire life's savings in a psychology study that determines the reaction time to read the date + time of this calendar/clock vs. reading high contrast numbers.

Functional trade-offs for "coolness" \- I didn't read that memo in Design school, sorry.

<comment><USER48> I saw this and immediately and intuitively read the face.

It clicked like no other clock design I've ever seen.

I may be in a .001% of people who see this and truly grok it, but that's fine. I'd wear a watch again for this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>